Smoking has become less prevalent in other countries, too, including Canada, Mexico and Iceland.

Overall, the prevalence of smoking has gone down worldwide over the past few decades. For men, smoking dropped 10 percentage points to 31 percent in 2012, from 41 percent in 1980. For women, it has been almost halved, falling from about 11 percent to 6 percent over the same period.

Click here or on the map to find the tobacco visualization tools put together by the institute.

One of the interactive maps lets you look at how prevalence changed from 2011 to 2012. Smoking has gone up recently in Sweden, Belarus and Mexico. It's down in the U.S., Hungary and Argentina.

You can also go beyond prevalence, and see how many cigarettes smokers are lighting up each year. By that measure, Suriname stands out on the high side.

One last thing about prevalence. While the proportion of the world's population that smokes has shrunk, the number of people on the earth continues to rise. So when you do the math, the total number of smokers has increased, despite all the public health efforts against tobacco use.

Bottom line: There were 967 million people who smoked in 2012, compared with 721 million in 1980.

The methods the researchers used to estimate smoking and the results of their analysis were published in JAMA, the American Medical Association's journal.